Aldous Huxley
Nicholas Murray
Little, Brown £20, pp496
Nicholas Murray faces two frustrations as a biographer of Aldous Huxley. One, paradoxically, is that Huxley was a conscientious archivist who kept, for instance, the love letters exchanged with his first wife, Maria, in a tin box, and also the journal she wrote before the war. This primary material and much else (at least two unfinished novels, the manuscript of DH Lawrence's St Mawr, literary correspondence and a copiously annotated library) was destroyed by fire at his Los Angeles house in 1961, two years before his death.
Huxley and his second wife, Laura, saved only a few things. He took the manuscript of his work in progress, his last novel Island, and some suits as an afterthought. Laura's priority was her Guarnieri violin, her afterthought a Chinese porcelain statue. They didn't seem to grasp the urgency involved. Murray comes close to reproaching them for their culpable serenity: 'This whole episode is very strange. Why, when the flames had not yet reached the house, did they not rescue more items? Why was there this paralysis of the will?'
Even if they had done a more efficient sweep of 3276 Deronda Drive, though, there's always a danger they would have saved items no more biographically significant than suits and violins. And there's something admirable about Huxley's refusal to be crushed by the obliteration of a large part of his past. The biographer sheds more tears than his subject. Asked by Sybille Bedford how he had coped, Huxley replied: 'One goes out and buys a toothbrush.'
Murray's other frustration is Bedford herself, who published in 1973-4 a two-volume authorised life of Huxley that has acquired something like classic status. Poised between the last days of whitewash and the current vogue for destructive biography, it was intimate and sympathetic without being uncritical. Murray has had access to some new material, but sometimes he overstates its importance, simply because it allows him to step out of Sybille Bedford's warm shadow.
There is substance to some of the novelties, particularly a long correspondence between both Huxleys and Mary Hutchinson, known in the history of Bloomsbury as the lover of Clive Bell. Aldous was shy and impractical, not the sort of man who could manage adultery without help from his wife. The correspondence with Mary Hutchinson makes clear that Maria was not merely complicit but actively 'omnifutuent', to borrow her husband's splendid word for bisexuality.
The connection between the women seems to have been stronger than anything that happened between Mary and Aldous, though he was certainly smitten. In the Huxley household, love was routinely triangular. For Maria at least, the excitement was partly to do with the idea of sharing Mary. In one strange letter of 1925, Maria writes to her: 'Aldous has just come into my bed & he smelt so strongly of you still that it made one giddy.' This would be perverse enough without the element of fantasy added by distance in time and space. When Maria wrote that letter, she and Aldous were in Belgium, Mary in London.
Sybille Bedford was not ignorant of Maria Huxley's involvements, and her omission of it from her biography may have been self-preserving as well as discreet, to judge by the comments by May Sarton which Murray reproduces in a footnote: 'Maria Huxley, you know, tamed women for Aldous. The young tigress, you know, she broke them in. Sybille what's her name who wrote about Aldous was both Aldous's and Maria's lover.' Even so, the new material doesn't greatly alter the picture of the marriage painted by Bedford - passionately loyal, intensified by any apparent distractions.
Murray's subtitle is 'An English Intellectual', as if to acknowledge that Huxley's standing as a writer of fiction has suffered since his death. Certainly it isn't easy to insist on the achievement of a novelist who disclaimed any great affinity with the genre. Brave New World, where the pessimism balances the tendency to preach, is the only certain survivor of his oeuvre.
Huxley's Englishness is, in a sense, self-evident, his Eton-Balliol-Bloomsbury formation the confluence of privileges which created the voice described by Robert Craft as a 'lambent, culture-saturated purr', the sheer, blithe opinionation that allowed him to come up with formulas like 'Penang has a certain Sicilian air', but he spent a third of his life based in America.
It's not that there was anything necessarily cowardly about the Huxleys leaving Britain in 1937 (near-blindness had already disqualified him for one world war), but Murray makes too much of their vicarious suffering in America. It's presumptuous, on the basis of his seeming drawn and strained to a visitor in 1940, to compare Aldous with Shakespeare's Miranda ('I have suffered with those I saw suffer'). 'It was as if the Huxleys, apparently in fortunate exile in the sun, had taken on themselves the anguish of their family and friends in Europe.'
His judgments elsewhere are more robust. He quotes Huxley on Kafka as a corrective to Huxley's own fictional practice: 'In a work of art, a truth is always a beauty-truth; and a beauty-truth is a mystical entity, a two-in-one; the truth is quite inseparable from its companion, so that you can only state in the most general terms what its nature is.' He quotes eloquent dissenting judgments made in Huxley's lifetime, the reservations expressed by Woolf and Isherwood, and the splendidly laconic account of him given by a bookseller friend of Lawrence's: 'Aldous he sit and make remark.'
Murray seems to have escaped the biographer's occupational hazard of disillusionment with his subject, but his readers may not. Huxley's great virtues are so consistently nibbled at by their opposites, his rationalism by wishful thinking, his liberalism by his attraction to eugenics and disapproval of universal free education. Above all, Murray should have steered clear of the formula - 'For Huxley, the personal was the political' - applied to a man who railed against the barbarising effect of the cinema but for years filled his pockets with the screenwriting dollar.